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Politics this week
Apr 19th 2007
From The Economist print edition
AP
In the biggest mass shooting in America's history, a student at Virginia Tech college in Blacksburg shot and killed 32 people on campus before turning the gun on himself. Cho Seung-hui, a South Korean national who emigrated to America as a child, was already in counselling and was causing concern to his teachers. College officials were criticised for not securing the campus immediately after the first two people were shot. In the more than two hours that were allowed to elapse before he resumed his killing spree, Cho took the time to post a macabre video manifesto to the NBC network in New York. See article
George Bush attended a convocation at the college and ordered flags to be flown at half-mast. A debate about gun control was begun by some, but even the Democrats backed away from calls to introduce legislation.
Paul Wolfowitz came under pressure to step down as head of the World Bank after it emerged he had secured favourable pay and work conditions for his girlfriend, a bank official. Mr Wolfowitz has spearheaded a controversial campaign against government corruption since taking charge of the bank. See article
The Supreme Court ruled, by five to four, that a ban on partial-birth abortions passed in 2003 by the then Republican Congress was constitutional. It is seen as a marked shift in the court's stance; for the first time it approved a restriction on abortion without regard for a woman's health. See article
The trial began of José Padilla, five years after he was arrested in connection with an alleged “dirty bomb” plot. Mr Padilla does not face any charges in relation to such a plot but is accused (with two co-defendants) of giving material support to terrorist groups. See article
New Jersey's governor remained in critical condition after a car crash. Jon Corzine was being driven to a conciliatory meeting he was to chair between the women's basketball team of Rutgers university and Don Imus, who was sacked from his popular radio show for making racist remarks about the players.
Confident Correa
Ecuador's president, Rafael Correa, won his controversial referendum to set up a “constituent assembly” to rewrite the constitution with 80% of the vote. Some fear he may now use this to concentrate power in his own hands. See article
In Mexico at least 20 people were killed in what police claimed was a feud between rival drug gangs. Meanwhile, in Brazil, battles between the police and competing drug gangs in Rio de Janeiro claimed the lives of 25 people.
The realm of possibilities
The campaign for the French presidential election drew to a close before polling day on April 22nd. The eventual result seemed uncertain, though the centre-right candidate, Nicolas Sarkozy, looked likely to come top in the first round. See article
AFP
Demonstrations in both Moscow and St Petersburg by Other Russia, an opposition group, were broken up violently by police, who arrested a former chess champion, Garry Kasparov, one of its leading lights. The crackdown confirms that Russia's government is in no mood to brook opposition, however small. See article
Ukraine's constitutional court began to consider whether President Viktor Yushchenko's decree dissolving parliament was constitutional. One of the judges was accused of receiving a $12m bribe. Protesters blocked the court's entrance in an effort to stop it sitting.
Leaving the country
The interim administration in Bangladesh in effect sent two of the country's former prime ministers into exile. It was announced that Khaleda Zia, prime minister until October 2006, would go to Saudi Arabia. Her rival, Sheikh Hasina Wajed, was in America, and has said she will try to defy a government order barring her from returning to Bangladesh. See article
North Korea missed the deadline—of April 14th—by when it was supposed to shut down its main nuclear reactor at Yongbyon. North Korea complains it still has not received roughly $25m frozen in accounts in a bank in Macau it regards as a precondition to closing the reactor. See article
The election commission in Nepal confirmed what many had feared: that it will not be ready to hold an election for a constituent assembly on June 20th as scheduled. The date was set as part of a peace agreement between mainstream political parties and Maoist rebels.
The mayor of Japan's southern city of Nagasaki was shot dead by a member of a criminal gang while campaigning for re-election.
Tensions rose in the Maldives after the death of a man the main opposition party, the Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP), alleges was killed in police custody.
A committee appointed by the junta running Thailand agreed on a new constitution, to be made public later this month and eventually submitted to a referendum. The junta's critics complain it abolishes the elected Senate in favour of an appointed one. See article
A virulent strain
Muqtada al-Sadr, Iraq's fiery populist cleric, withdrew all six ministers loyal to him from Nuri al-Maliki's coalition government because the prime minister refused to set a deadline for withdrawing American troops. Mr Maliki looked increasingly weak as sectarian violence in Baghdad showed no signs of lessening: on April 18th car bombs killed nearly 200 people, the city's bloodiest day since the “surge” of troops began two months ago. See article
Sudan's government agreed to allow some 3,000 UN troops to be sent to buttress the 7,000 troops already deployed in the embattled Darfur region under the aegis of the African Union. President Bush said tougher sanctions should be imposed if Omar al-Bashir's government fails to co-operate fully. See article
The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, said he had agreed with militant groups to stop launching rockets against Israel; he and Israel's prime minister, Ehud Olmert, agreed to draw up lists of confidence-building measures in an effort to rekindle peace between the two sides.
AFP
The election of governors and legislators in Nigeria's 36 states was marred by massive vote-rigging, allowing the ruling People's Democratic Party to win nearly all the top posts. The opposition parties now threaten to boycott the presidential and federal elections due on April 21st. See article
Business this week
Apr 19th 2007
From The Economist print edition
Google extended its sway over online advertising by agreeing to pay $3.1 billion for DoubleClick, the market leader in placing display advertisements on websites. The deal was criticised by some of Google's rivals, including Microsoft, on antitrust grounds. The internet company already dominates what is considered to be a separate market for paid-search advertising.
Meanwhile, Google advanced another step into more traditional media markets when it made a deal to place advertisements for its online customers on the network owned by Clear Channel. Separately, America's biggest radio-station operator accepted a sweetened $19.4 billion buy-out, though the offer is opposed by some shareholders. See article
The share price of Yahoo! dropped after its quarterly earnings disappointed investors, who had been expecting the company's new and much-trumpeted online advertising system to give it a boost. Instead, profit fell by 11% compared with a year ago.
Microsoft and Adobe both unveiled products that could encroach on each other's territory on the internet. Microsoft took the curtains off Silverlight, which rivals the Adobe Flash player used to power graphics and video on many websites, including YouTube. And Adobe introduced its media player, a potential competitor to Microsoft's tool for playing audio and film clips on personal computers.
Sweet for Sallie
A consortium of private-equity funds and banks said it would buy Sallie Mae, which provides loans to American students, for $25 billion. The deal comes amid intense regulatory scrutiny of the student-loan industry: Sallie Mae reached a settlement with New York last week over the state's investigation into ties between lenders and colleges. The consortium believes that increases in tuition fees and more students mean it will gain from the investment. See article
Barclays and ABN AMRO extended the deadline of their merger talks, which had been due to end on April 18th. The British bank is offering to buy its Dutch rival, but a group of three other banks is hovering with a rival bid.
America's banks began reporting their first-quarter earnings, with most producing results that analysts described as mediocre. However, Citigroup cheered investors when it announced higher revenues and profits that were better than expected. The share price of JPMorgan Chase also did well after it said net income had risen by 55%, compared with last year, to $4.8 billion.
All at sea
The US Coast Guard announced that it was taking over the management of its $24 billion “Deepwater” fleet-modernisation project. Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, two defence contractors, have formed a partnership to carry out the works, but the programme has been beset by problems. Eight refitted 123-foot (37-metre) patrol boats were found to be structurally unsound and had to be decommissioned. See article
AT&T dropped its plan to buy part of a controlling stake in Telecom Italia from Pirelli, an Italian conglomerate. AT&T had wanted to acquire the investment in partnership with América Móvil, a Mexican mobile-phone operator, which said it was still interested after AT&T pulled out. Their joint effort had caused Italian politicians to fulminate against the loss of a “strategic” national asset. After AT&T's decision, the prime minister, Romano Prodi, reiterated his stance that TI should remain in Italian hands.
Vonage claimed that a dispute over three patents owned by Verizon could force it into bankruptcy. A court ruled recently that Vonage could not take new customers for its internet-phone service until the case is resolved later this month. The chief executive of the company, which has seen its share price fall by 80% since its public offering last May, stepped down last week.
Australia's Orica, the world's largest explosives company, which began by supplying gold mines in the 19th century, rejected a A$10 billion ($8.3 billion) buy-out from a private-equity consortium.
China's economy grew by 11.1% in the year to the first quarter and its inflation rate rose to 3.3% in March. Both figures were higher than expected. China released the data after Asian markets closed amid speculation that the government might announce a plan to try and curb growth.
Sterling effort
The pound broke the $2 barrier for the first time in 15 years as markets calculated that a surprise surge in inflation in Britain would lead to an interest-rate rise. The euro also rose against the dollar, nearing a record high, after data from America showed that core inflation had eased. See article
KAL's cartoon
Apr 19th 2007
From The Economist print edition
Kevin Kallaugher
After the Virginia Tech massacre
America's tragedy
Apr 19th 2007
From The Economist print edition
Its politicians are still running away from a debate about guns
The Economist
Get article background
IN THE aftermath of the massacre at Virginia Tech university on April 16th, as the nation mourned a fresh springtime crop of young lives cut short by a psychopath's bullets, President George Bush and those vying for his job offered their prayers and condolences. They spoke eloquently of their shock and sadness and horror at the tragedy (see article). The Democratic speaker of the House of Representatives called for a “moment of silence”. Only two candidates said anything about guns, and that was to support the right to have them.
Cho Seung-hui does not stand for America's students, any more than Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris did when they slaughtered 13 of their fellow high-school students at Columbine in 1999. Such disturbed people exist in every society. The difference, as everyone knows but no one in authority was saying this week, is that in America such individuals have easy access to weapons of terrible destructive power. Cho killed his victims with two guns, one of them a Glock 9mm semi-automatic pistol, a rapid-fire weapon that is available only to police in virtually every other country, but which can legally be bought over the counter in thousands of gun-shops in America. There are estimated to be some 240m guns in America, considerably more than there are adults, and around a third of them are handguns, easy to conceal and use. Had powerful guns not been available to him, the deranged Cho would have killed fewer people, and perhaps none at all.
But the tragedies of Virginia Tech—and Columbine, and Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, where five girls were shot at an Amish school last year—are not the full measure of the curse of guns. More bleakly terrible is America's annual harvest of gun deaths that are not mass murders: some 14,000 routine killings committed in 2005 with guns, to which must be added 16,000 suicides by firearm and 650 fatal accidents (2004 figures). Many of these, especially the suicides, would have happened anyway: but guns make them much easier. Since the killing of John Kennedy in 1963, more Americans have died by American gunfire than perished on foreign battlefields in the whole of the 20th century. In 2005 more than 400 children were murdered with guns.
The trigger and the damage done
The news is not uniformly bad: gun crime fell steadily throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. But it is still at dreadful levels, and it rose sharply again in 2005. Police report that in many cities it rose even faster in 2006. William Bratton, the police chief of Los Angeles (and formerly of New York), speaks of a “gathering storm of crime”. Politicians on both sides, he says, have been “captured” by the vocal National Rifle Association (NRA). The silence over Virginia Tech shows he has a point.
The Democrats have been the most disappointing, because until recently they had been the party of gun control. In 1994 President Bill Clinton approved a bill banning assault weapons (covering semi-automatic rifles plus high-capacity magazines for handguns) and the year before that a bill imposing a requirement for background checks. But Democrats believe they paid a high price for their courage: losing the House of Representatives in 1994 shortly after the assault-weapons ban, and then losing the presidency in 2000. Had Al Gore held Arkansas or West Virginia or his own Tennessee, all strongly pro-gun, he would have won the election. These days, with hopes for a victory in 2008 dependent on the South and the mountain West, it is a brave Democrat who will talk about gun control. Some of them dismiss the very idea as “insensitive”.
Mr Bush however, has done active damage. On his watch the assault-
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